Media reports in the United Kingdom cite bad timing and centralization of public health laboratories as reasons the UK is struggling to meet testing goals
Clinical pathologists and medical laboratories in UK and the US function within radically different healthcare systems. However, both countries faced similar problems deploying widespread diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. And the differences between America’s private healthcare system and the UK’s government-run, single-payer system are exacerbating the UK’s difficulties expanding coronavirus testing to its citizens.
The Dark Daily reported in March that a manufacturing snafu had delayed distribution of a CDC-developed diagnostic test to public health laboratories. This meant virtually all testing had to be performed at the CDC, which further slowed testing. Only later that month was the US able to significantly ramp up its testing capacity, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project.
However, the UK has fared even worse, trailing Germany, the US, and other countries, according to reports in Buzzfeed and other media outlets. On March 11, the UK government established a goal of administering 10,000 COVID-19 tests per day by late March, but fell far short of that mark, The Guardian reported. The UK government now aims to increase this to 25,000 tests per day by late April.
This compares with about 70,000 COVID-19 tests per day in
Germany, the Guardian reported, and about 130,000 per day in the US
(between March 26 and April 14), according to the COVID Tracking Project.
“Ministers need to explain why the NHS [National Health Service] is not testing to capacity, why we are falling behind other countries, and what measures they will put in place to address this situation as a matter of urgency,” MP Keir Starmer (above) said in Parliament in late March, The Guardian reported. (Photo copyright: The Guardian.)
What’s Behind the UK’s Lackluster COVID-19 Testing
Response
In January, when the outbreak first hit, Public Health England (PHE) “began a strict program of contact tracing and testing potential cases,” Buzzfeed reported. But due to limited medical laboratory capacity and low supplies of COVID-19 test kits, the government changed course and de-emphasized testing, instead focusing on increased ICU and ventilator capacity. (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland each have separate public health agencies and national health services.)
Later, when the need for more COVID-19 testing became
apparent, UK pathology laboratories had to contend with global shortages of
testing kits and chemicals, The Guardian reported. At present, COVID-19 testing
is limited to healthcare workers and patients displaying symptoms of pneumonia,
acute
respiratory distress syndrome, or influenza-like illness, PHE stated in “COVID-19:
Investigation and Initial Clinical Management of Possible Cases” guidance.
Another factor that has limited widespread COVID-19 testing is the country’s highly-centralized system of public health laboratories, Buzzfeed reported. “This has limited its ability to scale and process results at the same speed as other countries, despite its efforts to ramp up capacity,” Buzzfeed reported. Public Health England, which initially performed COVID-19 testing at one lab, has expanded to 12 labs. NHS laboratories also are testing for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, PHE stated in “COVID-19: How to Arrange Laboratory Testing” guidance.
Sharon Peacock, PhD, PHE’s National Infection Service Interim Director, Professor of Public Health and Microbiology at the University of Cambridge, and honorary consultant microbiologist at the Cambridge clinical and public health laboratory based at Addenbrookes Hospital, defended this approach at a March hearing of the Science and Technology Committee (Commons) in Parliament.
“Laboratories in this country have largely been merged, so we have a smaller number of larger [medical] laboratories,” she said. “The alternative is to have a single large testing site. From my perspective, it is more efficient to have a bigger testing site than dissipating our efforts into a lot of laboratories around the country.”
Writing in The Guardian, Paul Hunter, MB ChB MD, a microbiologist and Professor of Medicine at University of East Anglia, cites historic factors behind the testing issue. The public health labs, he explained, were established in 1946 as part of the National Health Service. At the time, they were part of the country’s defense against bacteriological warfare. They became part of the UK’s Health Protection Agency (now PHE) in 2003. “Many of the laboratories in the old network were shut down, taken over by local hospitals or merged into a smaller number of regional laboratories,” he wrote.
US Facing Different Clinical Laboratory Testing Problems
Meanwhile, a few medical laboratories in the US are now contending with a different problem: Unused testing capacity, Nature reported. For example, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., can run up to 2,000 tests per day, “but we aren’t doing that many,” Stacey Gabriel, PhD, a human geneticist and Senior Director of the Genomics Platform at the Broad Institute, told Nature. Factors include supply shortages and incompatibility between electronic health record (EHR) systems at hospitals and academic labs, Nature reported.
Politico
cited the CDC’s narrow testing criteria, and a lack of supplies for collecting
and analyzing patient samples—such as swabs and personal protective equipment—as
reasons for the slowdown in testing at some clinical laboratories in the US.
Challenges Deploying Antibody Tests in UK
The UK has also had problems deploying serology tests designed to detect whether people have developed antibodies against the virus. In late March, Peacock told members of Parliament that at-home test kits for COVID-19 would be available to the public through Amazon and retail pharmacy chains, the Independent reported. And, Politico reported that the government had ordered 3.5 million at-home test kits for COVID-19.
However, researchers at the University of Oxford who had been charged with validating the accuracy of the kits, reported on April 5 that the tests had not performed well and did not meet criteria established by the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). “We see many false negatives (tests where no antibody is detected despite the fact we know it is there), and we also see false positives,” wrote Professor Sir John Bell, GBE, FRS, Professor of Medicine at the university, in a blog post. No test [for COVID-19], he wrote, “has been acclaimed by health authorities as having the necessary characteristics for screening people accurately for protective immunity.”
He added that it would be “at least a month” before suppliers could develop an acceptable COVID-19 test.
In the United States, the Cellex COVID-19 test is intended for use by medical laboratories. As well, many research sites, academic medical centers, clinical laboratories, and in vitro diagnostics (IVD) companies in the US are working to develop and validate serological tests for COVID-19.
Within weeks, it is expected that a growing number of such
tests will qualify for a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Emergency Use
Authorization (EUA) and become available for use in patient care.
AccuWeather interviewed experts, including pathologists who have analyzed the virus, who say SARS-CoV-2 is susceptible to heat, light, and humidity, while others study weather patterns for their predictions
AccuWeather, as it watched the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, wanted to know what effect that warmer spring temperatures might have on curbing the spread of the virus. There is a good reason to ask this question. As microbiologists, infectious disease doctors, and primary care physicians know, the typical start and end to every flu season is well-documented and closely watched.
As SARS-CoV-2 ravages countries around the world, clinical pathologists and microbiologists debate whether it will subside as temperatures rise in Spring and Summer. Recent analyses suggest it may indeed be a seasonal phenomenon. However, some infectious disease specialists have expressed skepticism.
CNN reported that Nicholls was part of a research team which reproduced the virus in January to study its behavior and evaluate diagnostic tests. Nicholls was also involved in an early effort to analyze the coronavirus associated with the 2003 SARS outbreak involving SARS-CoV, another coronavirus that originated in Asia.
“Sunlight will cut the virus’ ability to grow in half, so the half-life will be 2.5 minutes and in the dark it’s about 13 to 20,” Nicholls told AccuWeather. “Sunlight is really good at killing viruses.” And that, “In cold environments, there is longer virus survival than warm ones.” He added, “I think it will burn itself out in about six months.”
The graphic above, created by John Nicholls, MBBS Adel, FRCPA, FHKCPath, FHKAM (Pathology), Clinical Professor of Pathology at the University of Hong Kong, shows “the temperate zone where the major SARS-CoV-2 hotspots have appeared so far. The variation from year to year, in this case, is minimal; however, meteorologists would typically use the 30-year normal data for this type of analysis.” (Caption and graphic copyright: AccuWeather/John Nicholls.)
Can Weather Predict the Spread of COVID-19?
Other researchers have analyzed regional weather data to see if there’s a correlation with incidence of COVID-19. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that the number of cases has been relatively low in areas with warm, humid conditions and higher in more northerly regions. They published their findings in SSRN (formerly Social Science Research Network), an open-access journal and repository for early-stage research, titled “Will Coronavirus Pandemic Diminish by Summer?”
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The MIT researchers found that as of March 22, 90% of the
transmissions of SARS-CoV-2 occurred within a temperature range of three to 17
degrees Celsius (37.4 to 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and an absolute humidity
range of four to nine grams per cubic meter. Fewer than 6% of the transmissions
have been in warmer climates further south, they wrote.
“Based on the current data on the spread of [SARS-CoV-2], we
hypothesize that the lower number of cases in tropical countries might be due
to warm humid conditions, under which the spread of the virus might be slower
as has been observed for other viruses,” they wrote.
In the US, “the outbreak also shows a north-south divide,”
with higher incidence in northern states, they wrote. The outliers are Oregon,
with fewer than 200 cases, and Louisiana, where, as of March 22, approximately
1,000 had been reported.
There’s been a recent spike in reported cases from warmer
regions in Asia, South America, and Africa, but the MIT researchers attribute
this largely to increased testing.
Still, “there may be several caveats to our work,” they
wrote in their published study. For example, South Korea has been engaged in
widespread testing that includes asymptomatic individuals, whereas other
countries, including the US, have limited testing to a narrower range of
people, which could mean that more cases are going undetected. “Further, the
rate of outdoor transmission versus indoor and direct versus indirect
transmission are also not well understood and environmental related impacts are
mostly applicable to outdoor transmissions,” the MIT researchers wrote.
Even in warmer, more humid regions, they advocate “proper
quarantine measures” to limit the spread of the virus.
The New York Times (NYT) reported that other recent studies have shown a correlation between weather conditions and the incidence of COVID-19 outbreaks as well, though none of this research has been peer reviewed.
Why the Correlation? It’s Unclear, MIT Says
Though the MIT researchers found a strong relation between
the number of cases and weather conditions, “the underlying reasoning behind
this relationship is still not clear,” they wrote. “Similarly, we do not know
which environmental factor is more important. It could be that either
temperature or absolute humidity is more important, or both may be equally or
not important at all in the transmission of [SARS-CoV-2].”
Some experts have looked at older coronaviruses for clues. “The coronavirus is surrounded by a lipid layer, in other words, a layer of fat,” said molecular virologist Thomas Pietschmann, PhD, Director of the Department for Experimental Virology at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in Hanover, Germany, in a story from German news service Deutsche Welle. This makes it susceptible to temperature increases, he suggested.
However, Pietschmann cautioned that because it’s a new
virus, scientists cannot say if it will behave like older viruses. “Honestly
speaking, we do not know the virus yet,” he concluded.
Epidemiologist and virologist Joseph Fair, PhD, MPH (above), Special Advisor for Ebola, USAID, and Research Professor at Texas A&M University, said that sunlight might be a bigger factor than temperature or humidity. “It really doesn’t have anything to do with the warmth, but it has to do with the length of the day and the exposure to sunlight which inactivates the virus through UV light,” he told NBC News. “The science is still out,” he said. “We can assume this will follow typical other coronavirus cases,” but “everyone in the scientific and public health community expect it to be back in the fall and we expect to be in this for quite some time.” (Photo copyright: Texas A&M University.)
Marc Lipsitch, DPhil, Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is skeptical that warmer weather will put the brakes on COVID-19. “While we may expect modest declines in the contagiousness of SARS-CoV-2 in warmer, wetter weather, and perhaps with the closing of schools in temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, it is not reasonable to expect these declines alone to slow transmission enough to make a big dent,” he wrote in a commentary for the center.
How should pathologists and clinical laboratories in this country prepare for COVID-19? Lipsitch wrote that Influenza does tend to be seasonal, in part because cold, dry air is highly conducive to flu transmission. However, “for coronaviruses, the relevance of this factor is unknown.” And “new viruses have a temporary but important advantage—few or no individuals in the population are immune to them,” which means they are not as susceptible to the factors that constrain older viruses in warmer, more humid months.
So, we may not yet know enough to adequately prepare for
what’s coming. Nevertheless, monitoring the rapidly changing data on COVID-19
should be part of every lab’s daily agenda.
‘Prime editing’ is what researchers are calling the proof-of-concept research that promises improved diagnostics and more effective treatments for patients with genetic defects
Known as Prime Editing, the scientists developed this technique as a more accurate way to edit Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). In a paper published in Nature, the authors claim prime editing has the potential to correct up to 89% of disease-causing genetic variations. They also claim prime editing is more powerful, precise, and flexible than CRISPR.
The research paper describes prime editing as a “versatile and precise genome editing method that directly writes new genetic information into a specified DNA site using a catalytically impaired Cas9endonuclease fused to an engineered reverse transcriptase, programmed with a prime editing guide RNA (pegRNA) that both specifies the target site and encodes the desired edit.”
And a Harvard Gazette article states, “Prime editing differs from previous genome-editing systems in that it uses RNA to direct the insertion of new DNA sequences in human cells.”
Assuming further research and clinical studies confirm the
viability of this technology, clinical laboratories would have a new diagnostic
service line that could become a significant proportion of a lab’s specimen
volume and test mix.
In that e-briefing we wrote that Liu “has led a team of scientists in the development of a gene-editing protein delivery system that uses cationic lipids and works on animal and human cells. The new delivery method is as effective as protein delivery via DNA and has significantly higher specificity. If developed, this technology could open the door to routine use of genome analysis, worked up by the clinical laboratory, as one element in therapeutic decision-making.”
Now, Liu has taken that development even further.
“A major aspiration in the molecular life sciences is the ability to precisely make any change to the genome in any location. We think prime editing brings us closer to that goal,” David Liu, PhD (above), Director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare at the Broad Institute, told The Harvard Gazette. “We’re not aware of another editing technology in mammalian cells that offers this level of versatility and precision with so few byproducts.” (Photo copyright: Broad Institute.)
Cell Division Not Necessary
CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. It is considered the most advanced gene editing technology available. However, it has one drawback not found in Prime Editing—CRISPR relies on a cell’s ability to divide to generate desired alterations in DNA—prime editing does not.
This means prime editing could be used to repair genetic mutations in cells that do not always divide, such as cells in the human nervous system. Another advantage of prime editing is that it does not cut both strands of the DNA double helix. This lowers the risk of making unintended, potentially dangerous changes to a patient’s DNA.
The researchers claim prime editing can eradicate long lengths of disease-causing DNA and insert curative DNA to repair dangerous mutations. These feats, they say, can be accomplished without triggering genome responses introduced by other forms of CRISPR that may be potentially harmful.
“Prime editors are more like word processors capable of
searching for targeted DNA sequences and precisely replacing them with edited
DNA strands,” Liu told NPR.
The scientists involved in the study have used prime editing to perform over 175 edits in human cells. In the test lab, they have succeeded in repairing genetic mutations that cause both Sickle Cell Anemia (SCA) and Tay-Sachs disease, NPR reported.
“Prime editing is really a step—and potentially a significant step—towards this long-term aspiration of the field in which we are trying to be able to make just about any kind of DNA change that anyone wants at just about any site in the human genome,” Liu told News Medical.
Additional Research Required, but Results are Promising
Prime editing is very new and warrants further
investigation. The researchers plan to continue their work on the technology by
performing additional testing and exploring delivery mechanisms that could lead
to human therapeutic applications.
“Prime editing should be tested and optimized in as many cell types as researchers are interested in editing. Our initial study showed prime editing in four human cancer cell lines, as well as in post-mitotic primary mouse cortical neurons,” Liu told STAT. “The efficiency of prime editing varied quite a bit across these cell types, so illuminating the cell-type and cell-state determinants of prime editing outcomes is one focus of our current efforts.”
Although further research and clinical studies are needed to
confirm the viability of prime editing, clinical laboratories could benefit
from this technology. It’s worth watching.
Genetic data captured by this new technology could lead to a new understanding of how different types of cells exchange information and would be a boon to anatomic pathology research worldwide
What if it were possible to map the interior of cells and view their genetic sequences using chemicals instead of light? Might that spark an entirely new way of studying human physiology? That’s what researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believe. They have developed a new approach to visualizing cells and tissues that could enable the development of entirely new anatomic pathology tests that target a broad range of cancers and diseases.
Scientists at MIT’s Broad Institute and McGovern Institute for Brain Research developed this new technique, which they call DNA Microscopy. They published their findings in Cell, titled, “DNA Microscopy: Optics-free Spatio-genetic Imaging by a Stand-Alone Chemical Reaction.”
Joshua Weinstein, PhD, a postdoctoral associate at the Broad Institute and first author of the study, said in a news release that DNA microscopy “is an entirely new way of visualizing cells that captures both spatial and genetic information simultaneously from a single specimen. It will allow us to see how genetically unique cells—those comprising the immune system, cancer, or the gut for instance—interact with one another and give rise to complex multicellular life.”
The news release goes on to state that the new technology “shows
how biomolecules such as DNA and RNA are organized in cells and tissues,
revealing spatial and molecular information that is not easily accessible
through other microscopy methods. DNA microscopy also does not require
specialized equipment, enabling large numbers of samples to be processed
simultaneously.”
The images above, taken from the MIT study, compares optical imaging of a cell population (left) with an inferred visualization of the same cell population based on the information provided by DNA microscopy (right). Scale bar = 100 μm (100 micrometers). This technology has the potential to be useful for anatomic pathologists at some future date. (Photo and caption copyrights: Joshua Weinstein, PhD, et al/Cell.)
New Way to Visualize Cells
The MIT researchers saw an opportunity for DNA microscopy to
find genomic-level cell information. They claim that DNA microscopy images
cells from the inside and enables the capture of more data than with
traditional light microscopy. Their new technique is a chemical-encoded
approach to mapping cells that derives critical genetic insights from the
organization of the DNA and RNA in cells and tissue.
And that type of genetic information could lead to new precision medicine treatments for chronic disease. New Atlas notes that “ Speeding the development of immunotherapy treatments by identifying the immune cells best suited to target a particular cancer cell is but one of the many potential application for DNA microscopy.”
In their published study, the scientists note that “Despite enormous progress in molecular profiling of cellular constituents, spatially mapping [cells] remains a disjointed and specialized machinery-intensive process, relying on either light microscopy or direct physical registration. Here, we demonstrate DNA microscopy, a distinct imaging modality for scalable, optics-free mapping of relative biomolecule positions.”
How DNA Microscopy Works
The New York Times (NYT) notes that the advantage of DNA microscopy is “that it combines spatial details with scientists’ growing interest in—and ability to measure—precise genomic sequences, much as Google Street View integrates restaurant names and reviews into outlines of city blocks.”
And Singularity Hub notes that “ DNA microscopy, uses only a pipette and some liquid reagents. Rather than monitoring photons, here the team relies on ‘bar codes’ that chemically tag onto biomolecules. Like cell phone towers, the tags amplify, broadcasting their signals outward. An algorithm can then piece together the captured location data and transform those GPS-like digits into rainbow-colored photos. The results are absolutely breathtaking. Cells shine like stars in a nebula, each pseudo-colored according to their genomic profiles.”
“We’ve used DNA in a way that’s mathematically similar to photons in light microscopy,” Weinstein said in the Broad Institute news release. “This allows us to visualize biology as cells see it and not as the human eye does.”
In their study, researchers used DNA microscopy to tag RNA
molecules and map locations of individual human cancer cells. Their method is
“surprisingly simple” New Atlas reported. Here’s how it’s done,
according to the MIT news release:
Small synthetic DNA tags (dubbed “barcodes” by the MIT team) are added to biological samples;
The “tags” latch onto molecules of genetic material in the cells;
The tags are then replicated through a chemical reaction;
The tags combine and create more unique DNA labels;
The scientists use a DNA sequencer to decode and reconstruct the biomolecules;
A computer algorithm decodes the data and converts it to images displaying the biomolecules’ positions within the cells.
The visualization above was created from data gathered by DNA microscopy, which peers inside individual cells. It demonstrates how DNA microscopy enables scientists to identify different cells (colored dots) within a sample—with no prior knowledge of what the sample looks like. (Photo and caption copyright: Joshua Weinstein, PhD, et al./Cell.)
“The first time I saw a DNA microscopy image, it blew me away,” said Aviv Regev, PhD, a biologist at the Broad Institute, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator, and co-author of the MIT study, in an HHMI news release. “It’s an entirely new category of microscopy. It’s not just a technique; it’s a way of doing things that we haven’t ever considered doing before.”
Precision Medicine Potential
“Every cell has a unique make-up of DNA letters or genotype. By capturing information directly from the molecules being studied, DNA microscopy opens up a new way of connecting genotype to phenotype,” said Feng Zhang, PhD, MIT Neuroscience Professor,
Core Institute Member of the Broad Institute, and
Investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, in the HHMI
news release.
In other words, DNA microscopy could someday have applications in precision medicine. The MIT researchers, according to Stat, plan to expand the technology further to include immune cells that target cancer.
The Broad Institute has applied for a patent on DNA
microscopy. Clinical laboratory and anatomic pathology group leaders seeking
novel resources for diagnosis and treatment of cancer may want to follow the MIT
scientists’ progress.
Even in its early stages the Human Cell Atlas project is impacting the direction of research and development of RNA sequencing and other genetic tests
No one knows exactly how many cell types exist in the human body. Though traditional texts place numbers in the hundreds, recent studies have found ranges from thousands to tens of thousands. Anatomic pathologists and clinical laboratory scientists know that the discovery of new types of human cells could lead to the creation of new medical laboratory tests.
So, it’s an important development that leaders of the Human Cell Atlas Consortium, a project comparable to the Human Genome Project, have set out to determine the exact numbers of cell types. And their findings could open up an entirely new field of diagnostic testing for clinical laboratories and anatomic pathology and lead to advances in precision medicine.
With the ability to identify cell types and sub-types associated with human disease and health conditions, medical labs could have a useful new way to help physicians make diagnoses and select appropriate therapies.
Begun in 2016, the group’s mission according to the Human Cell Atlas website is “To create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.”
The ambitious project aims to catalog every cell type in the human body and “account for and better understand every cell type and sub-type, and how they interact.”
Striving for Deeper Understanding of the Basics
Cells are the basic building blocks of life, but scientists don’t know exactly how many different types of cells there are.
In an NPR interview, Aviv Regev, PhD, Professor of Biology and a core member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and co-leader of the Human Cell Atlas Consortium, said, “No one really knows how many [cells types] there will be,” adding, “People guess anything from the thousands to the tens of thousands. I’m not guessing. I would rather actually get the measurements done and have a precise answer.”
In an innovative move, Regev and her team improved the method they were already using to sort cells—single-cell RNA sequencing. “All of sudden we moved from something that was very laborious—and we could do maybe a few dozen or a few hundred—to something where we could do many, many thousands in a 15- to 20-minute experiment,” she told NPR.
But the project is massive. A typical human body contains about 37.2 trillion cells. So, the Human Cell Atlas scientists decided to complete preliminary pilot projects to identify the most efficient and effective strategies for sampling and analyzing the various cells to create the full atlas.
“It’s kind of like we’re trying to find out what are all the different colors of Lego building blocks that we have in our bodies,” Sarah Teichmann, PhD, Head of Cellular Genetics and Senior Group Leader at Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK, and co-leader of the Human Cell Atlas Consortium, told NPR. “We’re trying to find out how those building blocks—how those Lego parts—fit together in three dimensions within each tissue.”
Sarah Teichmann, PhD (left), and Aviv Regev, PhD (right), are co-leaders of the Human Cell Atlas Consortium, an ambitious project of MIT/Harvard Broad Institute that seeks to “create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.” Such an advance could lead to significant advances in clinical laboratory and pathology testing and move healthcare closer to true precision medicine. (Photo copyrights: University of Cambridge and MIT/Broad Institute.
Some of the early pilot projects include a partnership with the Immunological Genome Project (ImmGen) to study and map the cells in the immune system. According to the Human Cell Atlas website, the partnership “will combine:
“deep knowledge of immunological lineages;
“clinical expertise and infrastructure needed to procure and process diverse samples;
“genomic and computational expertise to resolve the hundreds of finely differentiated cell types that compose all facets of the immune system; and,
the genomic signatures that define them.”
Other areas the pilot projects will address include:
the Human Developmental Cell Atlas (HDCS), which will investigate the highly specialized cells involved in human development.
Progress So Far
In the two short years since the Human Cell Atlas project began much work has already been accomplished, according to a news release. In addition to organizing the consortium and obtaining funding, the collaborators have published a white paper describing their goals and a framework for reaching them, as well as launching the pilot projects.
Such an ambitious project, however, is not without barriers and challenges. Regev and Teichmann, along with other collaborators, outlined some of those challenges in an article published in Nature.
The complexity of the human body combined with rapidly changing technology make simply agreeing on the scope of the project challenging. In order to meet that particular challenge, the collaborators plan to work in phases and drafts, which will allow for some flexibility and increasing focus on specifics as they go.
Other challenges include:
keeping the entire project open and fair;
procuring samples with consent and in an appropriate manner; and,
organizing in an efficient and effective manner.
The collaborators have developed and detailed strategies for meeting each of these challenges.
The Human Cell Atlas could impact treatments for every disease that affects humans and bring healthcare closer to accomplishing precision medicine goals. By knowing what cells exist in what parts of the human body—and how they typically behave at their most basic levels—the MIT/Harvard/Broad Institute scientists hope to understand what’s happening when those cells “misbehave” in expected ways. The knowledge garnered from the Human Cell Atlas is likely to be invaluable to anatomic pathologists and clinical laboratories.
